首位自闭症患者唐纳德·特里普利特 | 经济学人讣告
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Donald Triplett
唐纳德·特里普利特
英文部分选自经济学人20230708期讣告
Donald Triplett
唐纳德·特里普利特
Through the dark clouds shining
乌云再厚，终有阳光乍泄
Donald Triplett, the first man to be diagnosed with autism, died on June 15th, aged 89
首位确诊的自闭症患者唐纳德·特里普利特于2023年6月15日去世，享年89岁
At first there were words, so many words.“Chrysanthemum!” was a favourite. He used to like saying that one. And “Dahlia” too—he liked that one so much he would repeat it: “Dahlia! Dahlia! Dahlia!” The five-year-old Donald Triplett had non-floral favourites as well. Sometimes, he sounded like an irate grammarian: “Semicolon, capital, slain, slain,” he would say. Then, as if conciliatory: “I could put a little comma.” Some of his phrases had an almost biblical beauty: “Through the dark clouds shining.”
一开始是蹦出各种单词。他最喜欢说的词是“菊花！”，曾经一直念叨。另外他还很喜欢“大丽花”这个词，会不停地重复：“大丽花！大丽花！大丽花！”。除了花卉类，五岁的唐纳德·特里普利特还有其他喜欢的词语。有时他会像个窝火的语法学家一样说话：“分号，大写，slay的过去式是slain，slay的过去式是slain。”过了一阵，他又缓和下来说道：“我可以加一个小逗号。”他说的有些话有种圣经般的美感：“乌云再厚，终有阳光乍泄”。
But if his words could be brilliant his meaning was often opaque. When he said“you” he meant “me”. When he said “yes” it meant “pick me up and put me on your shoulders.” When someone stood on his toy he said “umbrella”. And what he meant by “chrysanthemum” was anybody’s guess. He had other idiosyncrasies, too. He shook his head, constantly, from side to side. He gave people numbers, not just names. And if his toys weren’t just so, he screamed till the muscles stood out on his neck. Most upsetting of all, he never seemed glad to see his mother, Mary. But he loved making things—blocks, pans, ashtrays, anything at all—spin. And when they span the boy would, as the psychiatrist’s report observed, jump up and down “in ecstasy”.
虽然用词精妙，但他表达的意思却往往模糊不清。他说的“你”其实是指“我”，“好”其实是说“把我抱起来，让我坐到你的肩膀上。”如果有人站在他的玩具上，他会说“伞”。谁也猜不透他说的“菊花”到底是什么意思。他还有其他癖好，比如会不停地左右摇头。除了名字，他还用数字来称呼身边的人。如果他对玩具不满意，他就会大声尖叫，脖子上的肌肉都突了出来。最让人难受的是，他似乎特别不情愿见到自己的母亲玛丽。他喜欢转东西，比如积木、平底锅、烟灰缸，任何东西都可以。根据精神科医生的的记载，唐纳德看着这些东西旋转时，会“欣喜若狂”地蹦蹦跳跳。
There were so many words. But there was no word for Donald. In the 1930s American psychiatry was not short of terms for what they called“nature’s mistakes”. There was “imbecile” and “cretin” and “lunatic”; there was “simpleton” and “dullard” and “dunce”. However there was nothing to describe a little boy who liked to shout “chrysanthemum” but didn’t hug his mother. Mary begged doctors to give her a term. She even took her son to Leo Kanner, the best child psychiatrist in America, but he too demurred. Modern medicine, he told her, had no words for this. So in despair she came up with her own. Her son, she wrote, was “hopelessly insane”. Kanner would, eventually, opt for a more neutral term for Donald. He would call him “Case 1”.
英语词汇千千万，却没有一个可以用来形容唐纳德。在20世纪30年代，美国精神科学界有很多词汇来描述所谓的“造物主的失误”：例如“低能儿”、“白痴”、“疯子”、“傻瓜”、“呆子”和“笨蛋”。然而，却没有一个词可以形容这个喜欢喊“菊花”、但不愿意拥抱母亲的小男孩。玛丽恳求医生给她一个说法，她甚至带儿子去见了美国最好的儿童精神病学家利奥·坎纳（Leo Kanner），但就连坎纳医生也无法给出答案。他告诉玛丽现代医学没有关于她儿子病情的描述定义；因此，绝望的玛丽自创了一个。她写道，她的儿子是“无可救药的疯子”。后来，坎纳用了一个更中性的词汇描述唐纳德，称他为“病例1”。
An earlier doctor, near her home in Forest, Mississippi, had been far less cautious. He had known exactly what was wrong with Mary’s boy: it was Mary. She had overstimulated him, with all her songs and all that talking. He knew how to cure him, too: Mary must put Donald in an institution, away from her. So she and her husband put their boy in the family Buick and drove him to a children’s institution in a town called Sanatorium. Then they left him there. And, in a way, it worked: Donald’s tantrums and screaming stopped. However so too did everything else. There was no more humming, or singing, or spinning. Now Donald did almost nothing at all. He just sat, motionless, in his regulation white bloomers and top. He was three years old.
玛丽家住密西西比州福雷斯特镇，之前先带着儿子给附近的医生看过，而这位医生就远没有坎纳那么谨慎了。他清楚玛丽的儿子出了什么问题：根源在玛丽身上。玛丽对儿子刺激过度，总在他耳边唱个不停，说个不停。另外他还知道如何治愈唐纳德：玛丽必须把唐纳德送进机构（干预），远离她本人。于是玛丽和丈夫开着家里的别克车，把儿子送到疗养院镇的一家儿童机构，让他独自在那里接受治疗。从某些方面看，这一招奏效了：唐纳德不再发脾气，也不尖叫了。然而，其他行为也都消失了。他不再哼曲、不再唱歌、不再转东西。唐纳德几乎什么都不做了，只是穿着规定的白色灯笼裤和上衣坐在那里，一动也不动。那时他三岁。
Which was why Mary ended up taking him to Kanner. He was an Austrian-Jewish psychiatrist who had come to America years before (he would later help hundreds of people escape from Nazi Germany). He was never much of a one for putting labels on people: they were more complicated than that. Then Mary turned up in his office with her boy Donald, and her husband, and her husband’s 33 pages of typed notes on his son (“obsessive”, Kanner observed). He read the notes and he studied the boy. He stuck a pin in Donald’s arm and was riveted to see that though the boy pushed the pin away, “He was never angry at the interfering person.” And he could see that this needed a name.
如此情景之下，玛丽最后找到了坎纳。坎纳是一名奥地利犹太裔精神病医生，旅居美国多年（后来还帮助数百人逃离纳粹德国的魔掌）。他从来不给人贴标签：他认为人可比标签表现的要复杂。在拜访坎纳医生的时候，玛丽和丈夫不仅带着儿子，还带上了丈夫打印出来的整整33页有关儿子的笔记（“极尽详实”，坎纳评价道）。坎纳看了笔记，对这个男孩做了仔细的了解。他将一枚别针扎入唐纳德的手臂，然后紧紧盯着这个男孩，结果发现唐纳德虽然推开了别针，“但对干扰他的人却不生气”。他看得出来，这种状况需要一个名字。
Kanner started work on a paper. He would include ten other children in it too but Donald would be his first: “Case 1”. Many of these children had wildly different characteristics, he wrote. However they all shared one thing: an “inability to relate themselves in the ordinary way to people”. Common English had no word for this, so Kanner borrowed a word for it from elsewhere in psychiatry. The word he chose came from a Greek word, “autos”, which meant “self”. Donald, he wrote, was “autistic”. Kanner went further: this “unique syndrome not heretofore reported” was rare—but probably more frequent than “the paucity of observed cases” made it seem. Kanner’s paper has since been cited 17,000 times.
坎纳开始写一篇新论文；论文中还包括了另外10个孩子，但唐纳德是他的首个研究对象——“病例1”。他在论文中写道，这些孩子当中有不少人有着截然不同的特征，但他们都有一个共同点：“无法与他人正常交往”。大众英语里没有形容这种情况的词汇，所以坎纳从其他的精神病学研究中借了一个词。这个借来的词源于希腊语“autos”，意为“自我”。他写道，唐纳德是“自闭的（autistic）”；这种“迄今为止未报道过的独特综合征”很罕见——但实际发病率比“发现的少量病例”可能要高。坎纳的论文至今已被引用17000次。
Later, Kanner would always say that he hadn’t discovered autism: it was there before. Not that the people of Forest, Mississippi, the home of its first case, knew much about that. Back in Forest (population—as Don could tell you—5,330), they hadn’t really heard about “autism”. But everyone knew Don. After those spells away, Don had come back to Forest and spent the rest of his life there: he graduated from high school there; learned to drive there; he even got a job in the bank there: he could add long numbers in his head faster than you could type them into a calculator. Sure, he was different. And never much of a one for chit-chat. But that was just Don. Too clever for his own good. A genius, they reckoned.
后来，坎纳总说自己不是发现了自闭症，毕竟自闭症之前就存在了。但在出现首个自闭症病例的密西西比州福雷斯特镇，人们对这种情况并不了解。福雷斯特镇居民（唐会告诉你，镇子人口是5330）此前从未听说过“自闭症”，但每个人都认识唐。是是非非消散后，唐回到了福雷斯特，并在那里度过余生：在这个小镇，他读完了高中，学会了开车，甚至在一家银行找了份工作，毕竟在对一长串数字做加法的时候，一般人还没来得及把数字输入计算器他就已经心算出来了。当然他还是与众不同，大家没办法和他聊天。但唐就是这样的人，对于像他这样的人来说，他已经太聪明了。人们认为他是一个天才。
注释：这里的“唐”是“唐纳德”的昵称。
And he was happy. He still gave numbers to people, too. Pastor Mark was 472. His friend Celeste was 1,315. Olivia and Toby were 154 and 155. And he just loved to flick people with rubber bands. At first he had flicked his colleagues at work, but then he got in a whole lot of trouble for that. So he took to getting his fellow workers when they were out and about. In the grocery store. In the parking lot. He used to keep the bands on his wrist so he was always ready. He particularly liked to flick Celeste in church. She’d feel the flick—it really stung!—and she’d know: that’s Don.
他总是乐呵呵的，还给人们编号。马可牧师是472号，朋友西莱斯特是1315号，奥利维亚和托比则是154号和155号。他喜欢用橡皮筋弹人。一开始他在上班时间用橡皮筋弹同事，并因此而麻烦不断。再之后，他便在同事外出时用橡皮筋弹他们，要么在杂货铺，要么在停车场。他总把皮筋戴在手腕上，时刻做好袭击同事的准备。他尤其喜欢在教堂弹西莱斯特，莱斯特会疼得龇牙咧嘴，心里明白肯定是唐。
Later, when other people started to know who Don was too, Forest looked out for him. When some journalists had wanted to write about him, they’d approached locals to ask if they could be introduced. Sure, they had said. Then they had said: and if you hurt him in any way we’ll make sure you regret it. Don’s story became a book; the book became a film, “In A Different Key”; and Don became an entry in the “Encyclopaedia Britannica”.
后来，唐的故事开始为更多人所知，镇上的人对他十分关照。有些记者想报道唐，便询问镇上的人能否联系上他，然后便得到这样的回答：联系上他没问题，但要是你以任何方式伤害唐，你肯定吃不了兜着走。后来唐的故事被编成了书，这本书又被翻拍成了电影《不同的音调》（In A Different Key）。唐也成为一则词条，被收进了《大英百科全书》。
Though to the people of Forest, he was always just Don. The pastor who preached at his funeral began his sermon by introducing himself with his number: I’m 472, he said. Later, others in the congregation had joined in: I’m 1,316. I’m 40. I’m 30. But Don had never given himself a number, so neither did they. To them, Donald Triplett—Case 1—was always just Don.
尽管唐纳德声名远扬，但对镇上的人来说，他永远只是唐。在唐葬礼上布道的牧师自我介绍时用了唐给他的编号；他说：“我是472”。其他人随后纷纷加入：“我是1316。”“我是40。”“我是30。”但唐从未给自己编号，其他人也未尝给他编号。对他们来说，自闭症“病例1”唐纳德·特里普利特永远只是他自己。
翻译组：
Cassie，准MTI，一心想吃口译面，早日坐进小黑屋
Qianna，对语言有点敏感，对逻辑十分执拗，对摇滚太过着迷
校对组：
Alison，翻译路上的小蜗牛
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观点|评论|思考
Alfredo，清纯男高体验卡仅剩几个月到期
唐纳德是世界上首位确诊的自闭症患者，拥有着独特的表达方式和行为习惯。尽管他的言语常常模糊不清，令人难以理解，但他内心深处的世界也许广袤无垠。
早些时候，人们对自闭症认识不足，对自闭症患者缺乏理解，难以找到一个合适、正面的词来描述像唐纳德一样的孩子。然而，唐纳德的母亲玛丽从未因此放弃他，并最终找到了儿童精神病学家坎纳。在深入观察和研究后，坎纳发明了“自闭症”这个词用来描述唐纳德及其他状况类似的孩子，并打开了自闭症研究的大门。
这篇文章启示着我们，在评判他人时要保持开放包容的心态。唐纳德的行为和言语或许会让人感到困惑，但这并不意味着他自身没有感受、思考和情感。在唐纳德的内心深处是一个充满着美、创造力与独特思维的世界，虽然呈现方式与众不同，但这并不减损其作为一个独立个体的价值。
在当今社会，我们还需要更多的理解与尊重。唐纳德的故事告诉我们，不能简单地用标签或刻板印象来定义他人，而应当关注和尊重每一个体的独特之处，追求现代社会的多样性，促进包容与理解，予以接纳和关怀。唐纳德一生的经历让我们确信：乌云再厚，终有阳光乍泄，带来希望与温暖。
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愿景